- The Geopolitics Of Biological Weapons, Part 1: A Useful And Timely Factual Overview
The Geopolitics Of Biological Weapons, Part 1: A Useful And Timely Factual Overview
Authored by Larry Romanoff via GlobalResearch.ca,
The US government and its many agencies and educational and health institutions, have for many decades conducted intensive research into biological warfare, in many cases strongly focused on race-specific pathogens.
In a report to the US Congress, the Department of Defense revealed that its program of creating artificial biological agents included modifying non-fatal viruses to make them lethal, and genetic engineering to alter the immunology of biological agents to make treatment and vaccinations impossible. The military report admitted that at the time it operated about 130 bio-weapons research facilities, dozens at US universities and others at many international sites outside the purview of the US Congress and the jurisdiction of the courts.
This knowledge hasn’t been a secret for a long time. In a classified 1948 report by the Pentagon’s Committee on Biological Warfare, the main selling point was that:
“A gun or a bomb leaves no doubt that a deliberate attack has occurred. But if … an epidemic slashes across a crowded city, there is no way of knowing whether anyone attacked, much less who”, adding hopefully that “A significant portion of the human population within selected target areas may be killed or incapacitated” with only very small amounts of a pathogen.
A US Army operating manual from 1956 stated explicitly that biological and chemical warfare were an integral operating portion of US military strategy, were not restricted in any way, and that Congress had given the military “First Strike” authority on their use. In 1959, an attempt by Congress to remove this first-strike authority was defeated by the White House and bio-chemical weapons expenditures increased from $75 million to almost $350 million. That was an enormous amount of money in the early 1960s.
US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (image on the right) executed 150 top-secret bio-weapons programs in the 1960s, performing bio-weapons experiments and field tests on an unwitting public, sometimes in foreign countries but most often against American citizens. McNamara ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff “to consider all possible applications” of these agents against enemy nations in a coherent plan for a total “biological and chemical deterrent capability”, the plan to include cost estimates and an “appraisal of international political consequences”.
In the year 2000, The Project for the New American Century produced a report titled, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, which contained a radical and belligerent Right-Wing policy ambition for America. Their report called itself a “blueprint for maintaining global US preeminence … and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” The authors, their genocidal mentality obvious, stated:
“Advanced forms of biological warfare that can ‘target’ specific genotypes may transform biological warfare … to a politically useful tool.”
Bio-Weapons Research Institutions
The US Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland is the military’s main facility for research on biological warfare. It comprises 80,000 m². By the mid-1980s, this bio-weapons section of Fort Detrick was receiving nearly $100 million per year, and this was only one of many sections.
When Japan invaded China, one of Dr. Ishii’s (unit 731) grand successes was to develop methods of mass-producing fleas and ticks infected with the plague and other lethal pathogens for distribution among civilian populations – which is how the Americans learned to weaponise insects – to breed and disseminate ticks infested with Lyme Disease from their secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory in New York State. This was also the source of the US programs of breeding and disseminating mosquitoes and fleas infected with cholera and Yellow Fever in China and North Korea, to say nothing of the domestic mosquito programs the US inflicted on its own people.
Founded on Ishii’s human research, the US military developed an entomological (insect) warfare facility, and initially prepared plans to attack Russia and the Soviet States with entomological bio-weapons. The facility was designed to produce 100 million yellow fever-infected mosquitoes per month, its output tested on unwitting American civilians by dropping infected mosquitoes and other insects over large portions of the US. As is so typical for the US military, these projects beginning in the 1950s and 1960s were given juvenile appellations like “Project Big Buzz” and “Project Big Itch” and “Operation Mayday”, but were tests of the feasibility of producing billions of insects, infecting them with lethal pathogens, then loading them into munitions and dispersing them over Russia from aircraft or even missiles.
From a US Army report from March of 1981, one writer noted that “you can marvel at how much (or how little) it would have cost to launch a yellow fever-infected mosquito attack on a city – with a handy “Cost per Death” chart included!.” The Dugway Sheep incident is worth attention as well.
Then we had “Operation Drop Kick”, designed to test various ways of dispersing infected insects over large geographical areas, the tests carried out over various parts of the continental US, including most of the East Coast. We had “Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). Then, as late as 2000, we had “Project Bacchus” designed to determine the feasibility of constructing an anthrax production facility in a foreign country while remaining undetected. There were other of these programs of course, all with foolish names and all designed to assess the dissemination of infected insects and other lethal pathogens into civilian populations. They were kept very secret since they were illegal in domestic law and contravened international law and many weapons treaties that other nations signed with the US in good faith.
In addition to Fort Detrick, the US military has a bio-weapons ordnance plant at Vigo, Indiana, which was a massive production facility that specialised in biological pathogens, and capable of producing 275,000 bombs containing Botulinum or one million anthrax bombs per month. The fermenter tanks at Vigo contained 250,000 gallons, or about one million liters, making it, according to reports, by far the largest bacterial mass-production facility in the world.
This was not a recent development; Vigo was fully operational during the Second World War, essentially a bio-anthrax factory, one of its first orders being from Winston Churchill in 1944 for 500,000 anthrax bombs, and which Churchill stated should be considered only the “first installment”. Vigo was eventually turned over to Pfizer for “antibiotics manufacture” and was replaced in the mid-1950s by a new state of the art facility at the Pine Bluff Arsenal.
The Daily News published an article on 24 September 2005, in which it detailed US Army plans for bulk purchases of anthrax, relating a series of contracts that had been discovered by Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, which emanated from the military’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. These notices asked various companies to tender for the production of bulk quantities of anthrax, as well as to produce “significant volumes” of other biological agents. One contract specified that the tendering company “must have the ability and be willing to grow (anthrax) in 1,500-litre quantities”, and “must also be able to produce 3,000-litre batches” of unspecified other biological agents.
When a nation’s military is producing lethal biological pathogens in quantities of millions of liters, it is time to stop pretending we are not engaged in biological warfare. It is of no comfort that the military might claim these to be “harmless” strains of pathogens, since (1) any facility capable of producing benign pathogens can easily produce lethal varieties and (2) there is no such thing as ‘harmless’ anthrax.
There is no material difference between a defensive and an offensive biowarfare program, and even fools cannot claim “self-defense” when producing millions of liters of anthrax. Even the US Government Accountability Office, in its 1994 report on these programs, stated that US military’s Biological Defense Program contained “scores of divisions, departments, research groups, bio-intelligence and more, by no means all related to “‘defense’ in any sense”, and were by nature belligerent and offensive military programs. We are nevertheless assured that the US “has never used biological weapons”, by the same people who were simultaneously tendering contracts for the production of anthrax and other “pathogens” in multiple batches of 3,000 liters. Dissembling propaganda is impossible to avoid in America, even in official military medical textbooks.
There were other sites and facilities besides Fort Detrick that were constructed by the US military solely for the development of bio-weapons, including the Horn Island Testing Station in Mississippi which was meant to be the primary bio-weapons testing site, and the Plum Island Germ Laboratory in New York State from which the military spread Lyme Disease among half the area population.
One portion of the Plum Island facility was designed exclusively to develop and test lethal animal pathogens that could destroy an enemy nation’s food supply – as the US attempted to do in North Korea. Deadly strains of foot-and-mouth disease were one result of this research, which the Americans later shared with their fellow psychopaths at Porton Down in the UK – who put it to good use. An additional portion was the development, testing and production of bombs containing what was called a “vegetable killer acid”, and which could destroy cereals, grains, and most cultivated vegetable crops. I have a strong suspicion that many of the recent bird flu and swine flu epidemics originated from pathogens created at Plum Island.
The textbook titled, Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare (2007), published by the US military’s Surgeon-General, admits to the establishment of “a large-scale production facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas”, with the new plant featuring “advanced laboratory … measures enabling large-scale fermentation, concentration, storage, and weaponisation of microorganisms”.
And it does also admit that by 1951, the US had produced its first biological weapons, anti-crop bombs, and “antipersonnel” munitions, having “weaponised and stockpiled” all these. It adds that the CIA had independently “developed weapons using toxins including cobra venom and saxitoxin for covert operations”, but that unfortunately “all records regarding their development and deployment were destroyed in 1972” when the information became public.
And the US military has tried to weaponise venereal diseases, leading to travesties like the Guatemala Syphilis project, where they infected thousands then left them to die. The official narrative, while admitting the criminality, stubbornly adheres to the tale of a charitable purpose of testing medications – for thousands who were specifically denied the medicines that would have saved their lives.
The US military appears desperate not only to find biological ways to kill nations of people, but is equally interested in methods of destroying their food supply. Accordingly, it also confessed to another several dozen (at least) occasions where devastating crop and plant disease agents had been released, in experiments to test methods of destroying the entire food plant life of an enemy nation. In 2012, Japanese media revealed that the United States government had tested specific, DNA-engineered crop-killing bioweapons in Okinawa and Taiwan during the 1960s and early 1970s, and that the US military tested some of these within the continental US as well. They were also applied in Vietnam. The purpose of Agent Orange was never as a defoliant as claimed, but developed instead to destroy Vietnam’s entire rice crops and to sufficiently contaminate the soil to prevent re-growth.
This is Part 1 of a 3 Part article.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 23:45 - How Couples Meet, Then & Now
How Couples Meet, Then & Now
Today’s daters are taking matters into their own hands. Seemingly no longer satisfied with the potential partners that life throws at them at work, in school and in their circle of friends, Statista’s Katharina Buchholz reports that an increasingly large number of heterosexual daters is opting to meet their partner online.
Surveys carried out and analyzed by Stanford University show that between 1995 and 2017 the number of heterosexuals who met their partner on the internet rose sharply from 2 percent to 39 percent. With the help of dating apps like Tinder and eHarmony, but also through social networking sites like Facebook, daters reconnected with old friends and acquaintances (8 percent of couples who met online), were introduced to someone (11 percent) or – in the majority of cases – met someone completely new on their own (81 percent).
You will find more infographics at Statista
The authors of the survey concluded that the main draw of looking for a stranger online was a larger set of choices than when leveraging friends and family, which was especially useful when “searching for something unusual or hard‐to‐find.“ In a similar vein, meeting your partner in a bar or restaurant was also on the rise between 1995 and 2017.
Stanford researchers excluded homosexuals from their analysis because they constitute a minority sexual orientation, making meeting someone online a more obvious choice for them than for heterosexuals. These were usually in a “thick dating market” (quote from Stanford) and therefore normally also able to identify several potential mates in their offline lives, according to the research.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 23:25 - Escobar: The Siren Call Of A "System Leader"
Escobar: The Siren Call Of A "System Leader"
Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,
A considerable spectrum of the liberal West takes the American interpretation of what civilization consists of to be something like an immutable law of nature. But what if this interpretation is on the verge of an irreparable breakdown?
Michael Vlahos has argued that the US is not a mere nation-state but a “system leader” – “a civilizational power like Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire.” And, we should add, China – which he did not mention. The system leader is “a universalistic identity framework tied to a state. This vantage is helpful because the United States clearly owns this identity framework today.”
Intel stalwart Alastair Crooke, in a searing essay, digs deeper into how this “civilizational vision” was “forcefully unfurled across the globe” as the inevitable, American manifest destiny: not only politically – including all the accouterments of Western individualism and neo-liberalism, but coupled with “the metaphysics of Judeo-Christianity, too”.
Crooke also notes how deeply ingrained the notion that victory in the Cold War “spectacularly affirmed” the superiority of the US civilizational vision among the US elite.
Well, the post-modern tragedy – from the point of view of US elites – is that soon this may not be the case anymore. The vicious civil war engulfing Washington for the past three years – with the whole world as stunned spectators – has just accelerated the malaise.
Remember Pax Mongolica
It’s sobering to consider that Pax Americana may be destined to a shorter historical existence than Pax Mongolica – established after Genghis Khan, the head of a nomad nation, went about conquering the world.
Genghis first invested in a trade offensive to take over the Silk Roads, crushing the Kara-Kitais in Eastern Turkestan, conquering Islamic Khorezm, and annexing Bukhara, Samarkand, Bactria, Khorasan and Afghanistan. The Mongols reached the outskirts of Vienna in 1241 and the Adriatic Sea one year after.
The superpower of the time extended from the Pacific to the Adriatic. We can barely imagine the shock for Western Christendom. Pope Gregory X was itching to know who these conquerors of the world were, and could be Christianized?
In parallel, only a victory by the Egyptian Mamluks in Galilee in 1260 saved Islam from being annexed to Pax Mongolica.
Pax Mongolica – a single, organized, efficient, tolerant power – coincided historically with the Golden Age of the Silk Roads. Kublai Khan – who lorded over Marco Polo – wanted to be more Chinese than the Chinese themselves. He wanted to prove that nomad conquerors turned sedentary could learn the rules of administration, commerce, literature and even navigation.
Yet when Kublai Khan died, the empire fragmented into rival khanates. Islam profited. Everything changed. A century later, the Mongols from China, Persia, Russia and Central Asia had nothing to do with their ancestors on horseback.
A jump cut to the young 21st century shows that the initiative, historically, is once again on the side of China, across the Heartland and lining up the Rimland. World-changing, game-changing enterprises don’t originate in the West anymore – as has been the case from the 16th century up to the late 20th century.
For all the vicious wishful thinking that coronavirus will derail the “Chinese century”, which will actually be the Eurasian Century, and amid the myopic tsunami of New Silk Roads demonization, it’s always easy to forget that implementation of myriad projects has not even started.
It should be in 2021 that all those corridors and axes of continental development pick up speed across Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, Central Asia, Southwest Asia, Russia and Europe, in parallel with the Maritime Silk Road configuring a true Eurasian string of pearls from Dalian to Piraeus, Trieste, Venice, Genoa, Hamburg and Rotterdam.
For the first time in two millennia, China is able to combine the dynamism of political and economic expansion both on the continental and maritime realms, something that the state did not experience since the short expeditionary stretch led by Admiral Zheng He in the Indian Ocean in the early 15th century. Eurasia, in the recent past, was under Western and Soviet colonization. Now it’s going all-out multipolar – a series of complex, evolving permutations led by Russia-China-Iran-Turkey-India-Pakistan-Kazakhstan.
Every player has no illusions about the “system leader” obsessions: to prevent Eurasia from uniting under one power – or coalition such as the Russia-China strategic partnership; ensure that Europe remains under US hegemony; prevent Southwest Asia – or the “Greater Middle East” – from being linked to Eurasian powers; and prevent by all means that Russia-China have unimpeded access to maritime lanes and trade corridors.
The message from Iran
In the meantime, a sneaking suspicion creeps in – that Iran’s game plan, in an echo of Donbass in 2014, may be about sucking US neocons into a trademark Russian cauldron in case the regime-change obsession is turbocharged.
There is a serious possibility that under maximum pressure Tehran might eventually abandon the JCPOA for good, as well as the NPT, thus openly inviting a US attack.
As it stands, Tehran has sent two very clear messages. The accuracy of the missile attack on the US Ayn Al-Asad base in Iraq, replying to the targeted assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani, means that any branch of the vast US network of bases is now vulnerable.
And the fog of non-denial denials surrounding the downing of the CIA Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) – essentially an aerial spook shop – in Ghazni, Afghanistan also carries a message.
CIA icon Mike d’Andrea, known as ‘Ayatollah Mike’, The Undertaker, the Dark Prince, or all of the above, may or may not have been on board. Irrespective of the fact that no US government source will ever confirm or deny that Ayatollah Mike is dead or alive, or even that he exists at all, the message remains the same: your soldiers and spooks are also vulnerable.
Since Pearl Harbor, no nation has dared to stare down the system leader so blatantly, as Iran did in Iraq. Vlahos mentioned something I saw for myself in 2003, how “young American soldiers referred to Iraqis as ‘Indians’, as though Mesopotamia were the Wild West”. Mesopotamia was one the crucial cradles of civilization as we know it. Well, in the end, that $2 trillion spent to bomb Iraq into democracy did no favors to the civilizational vision of the ‘system leader’.
The Sirens and La Dolce Vita
Now let’s add aesthetics to our “civilizational” politics. Every time I visit Venice – which in itself is a living metaphor for both the flimsiness of empires and the Decline of the West – I retrace selected steps in The Cantos, Ezra Pound’s epic masterpiece.
Last December, after many years, I went back to the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, also known as “The jewel box”, which plays a starring role in The Cantos. As I arrived I told the custodian signora that I had come for “The Sirens”. With a knowing smirk, she lighted my way along the nave to the central staircase. And there they were, sculpted on pillars on both sides of a balcony: “Crystal columns, acanthus, sirens in the pillar head”, as we read in Canto 20.
These sirens were sculpted by Tullio and Antonio Lombardo, sons of Pietro Lombardo, Venetian masters of the late 15th and early 16th century – “and Tullio Romano carved the sirens, as the old custode says: so that since then no one has been able to carve them for the jewel box, Santa Maria dei Miracoli”, as we read in Canto 76.
Well, Pound misnamed the creator of the sirens, but, that’s not the point. The point is how Pound saw the sirens as the epitome of a strong culture – “the perception of a whole age, of whole congeries and sequence of causes, went into an assemblage of detail, whereof it would be impossible to speak in terms of magnitude”, as Pound wrote in Guide to Kulchur.
As much as his beloved masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini and Piero della Francesca, Pound fully grasped how these sirens were the antithesis of usura – or the “art” of lending money at exorbitant interest rates, which not only deprives a culture of the best of art, as Pound describes it, but is also one of the pillars for the total financialization and marketization of life itself, a process that Pound brilliantly foresaw, when he wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley that, “all things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness, shall reign throughout our days.”
La Dolce Vita will turn 60 in 2020. Much as Pound’s sirens, Fellini’s now mythological tour de force in Rome is like a black and white celluloid palimpsest of a bygone era, the birth of the Swingin’ Sixties. Marcello (Marcello Mastroianni) and Maddalena (Anouk Aimee), impossibly cool and chic, are like the Last Woman and the Last Man before the deluge of “tawdry cheapness”. In the end, Fellini shows us Marcello despairing at the ugliness and, yes, cheapness intruding in his beautiful mini-universe – the lineaments of the trash culture fabricated and sold by the ‘system leader’ about to engulf us all.
Pound was a human, all too human American maverick of unbridled classical genius. The ‘system leader’ misinterpreted him; treated him as a traitor; caged him in Pisa; and dispatched him to a mental hospital in the US. I still wonder whether he may have seen and appreciated La Dolce Vita during the 1960s, before he died in Venice in 1972. After all, there was a little cinema within walking distance of the house in Calle Querini where he lived with Olga Rudge.
“Marcello!” We’re still haunted by Anita Ekberg’s iconic siren call, half-immersed in the Fontana di Trevi. Today, still hostages of the crumbling civilizational vision of the ‘system leader’, at best we barely muster, as TS Eliot memorably wrote, a “backward half-look, over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 23:05 - "I Have No Idea What To Do Now": South Korean & Japanese Firms Screwed By Shortage Of Chinese Migrant Workers
"I Have No Idea What To Do Now": South Korean & Japanese Firms Screwed By Shortage Of Chinese Migrant Workers
Since COVID-19 went global just over two weeks ago, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing how China’s economic shutdown is going to impact the global economy. But by focusing on giant companies like GM and Foxconn, we’ve maybe overlooked some of the little people.
People like the millions of Chinese migrant workers who occupy unskilled and skilled jobs in South Korea and Japan. Many companies in agriculture and construction employ young Chinese ‘technical interns’ to compensate for serious labor shortages. These workers effectively form the base of a transnational supply chain. And without workers, the agricultural sector could be in a serious bind as the spring and summer approach.
In a story published Friday, the Nikkei Asian Review offers a glimpse into the world of migrant workers in Japan and South Korea (the paper essentially caters to English speakers in East Asia outside mainland China).
As Nikkei reminds us, South Korea’s economy has experienced a serious backlash from the global resurgence of protectionism and mercantilist trade policies. These changes have disrupted trade and global supply chains across Asia, creating winners and losers (Vietnam has often been cited as a beneficiary of President Trump’s antagonism of Beijing), and South Korea is an example of a fast-growing economy that has been upended. Some economists have gone so far as to argue that it could be the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the global economy if trade continues to decline.
That being said, the situation is often overshadowed by South Korea’s accomplishments in culture and arts. A foreign film directed by a South Korean and produced in South Korea won best picture at the 2019 Academy Awards, becoming the first foreign film to ever win the honor. Young Americans are increasingly listening to Korean “K-Pop” artists directed at the teenage demographic in South Korea.
In some cases, Chinese workers who have lived in South Korea for years are being fired in what some might describe as a xenophobic panic.
Ahn and Choi are among those impacted by the outbreak. On Wednesday, the two men were sharing a drink of Korean rice wine at a convenience store in Daelim-dong, the largest residential and commercial area for Korean-Chinese workers in Seoul, and commiserating over their plight.
Choi, 62, said he was fired a week ago from a hospital in Pyeongtaek, 65 km south of Seoul, where he had worked as a caregiver for a year. Choi is from Jilin Province in northeastern China, where many people of Korean descent live.
“I was forced to leave my job just because I am Chinese,” said Choi, adding that he has been in South Korea for more than a decade.
“I have no idea what to do now.”
Ahn, meanwhile, said he has no hope of getting a cleaning job at a sauna or a golf course because people are avoiding such activities due to fear of the coronavirus, which had infected 28 people in the country as of Wednesday.
“Many stores and companies are closed due to the virus. I hope it goes away as soon as possible.”
Chinese who speak Korean (there are ethnic Korean communities in mainland China) are often sought after in South Korea for jobs, some of which can still pay a decent wage, even if the primary appeal of the workers is that they’re generally cheaper to hire than locals (veteran Silicon Valley coders should recognize this dynamic).
But some of the labor shortages are the result of genuine problems with getting workers from one place to the next when countries around the world are tightening their borders. As NAR explains, in Japan, the problem is that prospective and current employees can’t get back to Japan after going home to visit family for the LNY holidays.
Agriculture, construction and other industries are really feeling the squeeze.
The problem is particularly acute for sectors such as agriculture and construction, which rely on Chinese “technical interns” to fill serious labor shortages.
The government-backed technical trainee program is often seen as a back door for foreign unskilled workers to work in manual labor in Japan. The interns typically stay in the country for three years, and are crucial for rural areas, whose own young populations are increasingly moving to big cities.
According to the Organization for Technical Intern Training, there were about 90,000 Chinese approved interns in 2018, accounting to 23% of the total.
Representatives from Japan’s big ag cooperatives spoke to the NAR about the problems, possibly in an effort to influence popular opinion and/or government policy.
They cited specific examples in the industry where companies depending on the Chinese “interns” are being left high and dry.
Several regional representatives for the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives expressed their concerns to the Nikkei Asian Review.
“Honestly, it will be a difficult situation if the trainees miss their schedule,” said Takayuki Fukuda, manager at JA Churui in Hokkaido.
Churui was expecting three interns from China’s Hubei Province, where the virus broke out, to arrive in March. Even if Japan allows entries from the province by then, the prospective interns are not able to take the necessary training in China. That means their arrival is likely to be delayed or cancelled, Fukuda said.
At Iwai in Ibaraki Prefecture, which produces green onions and lettuce, three technical interns from Hubei and Sichuan provinces who went home for the Lunar New Year are unable to come back to Japan. JA Iwai is also expecting four new Chinese trainees in June, but “we are considering delaying their participation,” a representative said.
In Tokyo, Takashi Maruyama at Shutoken Shouko Kensetsu Cooperative for the construction sector also said some Chinese interns cannot return for work from their holidays. He added that he is concerned about the new interns who were scheduled to arrive in the next months.
The cooperative sends about five to 10 Chinese interns to its member companies every month. “There has been labor shortage in the last few years,” Maruyama said. “If the virus situation do not calm down, companies will be affected.”
The virus may also hit factories. Some Chinese interns for Aichi Machine Industry Cooperative, which is located in the hometown of Toyota and its suppliers, are also expected to delay their arrival.
The cooperative’s representative said it will consider taking more interns from other countries instead “depending on the situation.” It currently accepts about 440 interns from China, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Globalization has created an international tapestry of goods, services and labor that’s almost inscrutably complex. But examples like these are a reminder: the economic ramifications of the outbreak will be felt outside the PRC.
Then again, we can’t help but wonder: Where could these countries turn for reliable migrant labor?
We have a few ideas…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 22:45 - We're All In This Together: A Case For Not Giving Up On The American Dream
We're All In This Together: A Case For Not Giving Up On The American Dream
Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
“We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Listen: we don’t have to agree about everything.
We don’t even have to agree about most things.
We don’t have to love each other. We don’t even have to like each other. And we certainly don’t need to think alike or dress alike or worship alike or vote alike or love alike.
But if this experiment in freedom is to succeed—and there are some days the outlook is decidedly grim—then we’ve got to find some way of relating to one another that is not toxic or partisan or hateful or so self-righteous that we’re doomed to failure before we even start.
America has been a warring nation—a military empire intent on occupation and conquest—for so long that perhaps we, the citizens of this warring nation, have forgotten what it means to live in peace, with the world and one another.
We’d better get back to the fundamentals of what it means to be human beings who can get along if we want to have any hope of restoring some semblance of sanity, civility and decency to what is progressively being turned into a foul-mouthed, hot-headed free-for-all bar fight by politicians for whom this is all one big, elaborate game designed to increase their powers and fatten their bank accounts.
Maybe Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was right: maybe all we really need to know about “how to live and what to do and how to be” is as simple as remembering the basic life lessons we were taught as children.
What were those lessons? Fulghum reminds us:
Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody…. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together…. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup—they all die. So do we. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned—the biggest word of all—LOOK. Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living. Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all—the whole world—had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess. And it is still true, no matter how old you are—when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
The powers-that-be want us to forget these basic lessons in how to get along. They want us to fume and rage and be so consumed with fighting the so-called enemies in our midst that we never notice the prison walls closing in around us.
Don’t be distracted.
No matter what happens in the next presidential election, no matter how many ways the powers-that-be attempt to sow division and distrust among the populace, no matter how many shouting commentators perpetuate the belief that there is only one “right” view and one “wrong” view in politics, the only “us vs. them” that will matter is whether “we the people” care enough to stand united in our commitment to the principles on which this nation was founded: freedom, justice, and equality for all.
The rest is just noise intended to distract us from the fact that life in America has become a gut-wrenching, soul-sucking, misery-drenched, demoralizing existence, and it’s the government that is responsible.
Even so, here’s why I’m not giving up on the American dream of freedom, and—despite all the reasons to the contrary—why you shouldn’t either: because this is still our country.
I’m outraged at what has been done to our freedoms and our country. You should be, too.
We have been subjected to crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.
We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.
We’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.
We’ve had our children burned by flashbang grenades, our dogs shot, and our old folks hospitalized after “accidental” encounters with marauding SWAT teams.
We’ve been told that as citizens we have no rights within 100 miles of our own border, now considered “Constitution-free zones.”
We’ve had our faces filed in government databases, our biometrics crosschecked against criminal databanks, and our consumerist tendencies catalogued for future marketing overtures.
We’ve seen the police transformed from community peacekeepers to point guards for the militarized corporate state. The police continue to push, prod, poke, probe, scan, shoot and intimidate the very individuals—we the taxpayers—whose rights they were hired to safeguard. Networked together through fusion centers, police have surreptitiously spied on our activities and snooped on our communications, using hi-tech devices provided by the Department of Homeland Security.
We’ve been deemed suspicious for engaging in such dubious activities as talking too long on a cell phone and stretching too long before jogging, dubbed extremists and terrorists for criticizing the government and suggesting it is tyrannical or oppressive, and subjected to forced colonoscopies and anal probes for allegedly rolling through a stop sign.
We’ve been arrested for all manner of “crimes” that never used to be considered criminal, let alone uncommon or unlawful, behavior: letting our kids walk to the playground alone, giving loose change to a homeless man, feeding the hungry, and living off the grid.
We’ve been sodomized, victimized, jeopardized, demoralized, traumatized, stigmatized, vandalized, demonized, polarized and terrorized, often without having done anything to justify such treatment. Blame it on a government mindset that renders us guilty before we’ve even been charged, let alone convicted, of any wrongdoing. In this way, law-abiding individuals have had their homes mistakenly raided by SWAT teams that got the address wrong. One accountant found himself at the center of a misguided (armed) police standoff after surveillance devices confused his license plate with that of a drug felon.
We’ve been railroaded into believing that our votes count, that we live in a republic or a democracy, that elections make a difference, that it matters whether we vote Republican or Democrat, and that our elected officials are looking out for our best interests. Truth be told, we live in an oligarchy, politicians represent only the profit motives of the corporate state, whose leaders know all too well that there is no discernible difference between red and blue politics, because there is only one color that matters in politics: green.
We’ve gone from having privacy in our inner sanctums to having nowhere to hide, with smart pills that monitor the conditions of our bodies, homes that spy on us (with smart meters that monitor our electric usage and thermostats and light switches that can be controlled remotely) and cars that listen to our conversations, track our whereabouts and report them to the police. Even our cities have become wall-to-wall electronic concentration camps, with police now able to record hi-def video of everything that takes place within city limits.
We’ve had our schools locked down and turned into prisons, our students handcuffed, shackled and arrested for engaging in childish behavior such as food fights, our children’s biometrics stored, their school IDs chipped, their movements tracked, and their data bought, sold and bartered for profit by government contractors, all the while they are treated like criminals and taught to march in lockstep with the police state.
We’ve been rendered enemy combatants in our own country, denied basic due process rights, held against our will without access to an attorney or being charged with a crime, and left to waste away in jail until such a time as the government is willing to let us go or allow us to defend ourselves.
We’ve had the very military weapons we funded with our hard-earned tax dollars used against us, from unpiloted, weaponized drones tracking our movements on the nation’s highways and byways and armored vehicles, assault rifles, sound cannons and grenade launchers in towns with little to no crime to an arsenal of military-grade weapons and equipment given free of charge to schools and universities.
We’ve been silenced, censored and forced to conform, shut up in free speech zones, gagged by hate crime laws, stifled by political correctness, muzzled by misguided anti-bullying statutes, and pepper sprayed for taking part in peaceful protests.
We’ve been shot by police for reaching for a license during a traffic stop, reaching for a baby during a drug bust, carrying a toy sword down a public street, and wearing headphones that hamper our ability to hear.
We’ve had our tax dollars spent on $30,000 worth of Starbucks for Department of Homeland Security employees, $630,000 in advertising to increase Facebook “likes” for the State Department, and close to $25 billion to fund projects ranging from the silly to the unnecessary, such as laughing classes for college students and programs teaching monkeys to play video games and gamble.
We’ve been treated like guinea pigs, targeted by the government and social media for psychological experiments on how to manipulate the masses. We’ve been tasered for talking back to police, tackled for taking pictures of police abuses, and threatened with jail time for invoking our rights. We’ve even been arrested by undercover cops stationed in public bathrooms who interpret men’s “shaking off” motions after urinating to be acts of lewdness.
We’ve had our possessions seized and stolen by law enforcement agencies looking to cash in on asset forfeiture schemes, our jails privatized and used as a source of cheap labor for megacorporations, our gardens smashed by police seeking out suspicious-looking plants that could be marijuana, and our buying habits turned into suspicious behavior by a government readily inclined to view its citizens as terrorists.
We’ve had our cities used for military training drills, with Black Hawk helicopters buzzing the skies, Urban Shield exercises overtaking our streets, and active shooter drills wreaking havoc on unsuspecting bystanders in our schools, shopping malls and other “soft target” locations.
We’ve been told that national security is more important than civil liberties, that police dogs’ noses are sufficient cause to carry out warrantless searches, that the best way not to get raped by police is to “follow the law,” that what a police officer says in court will be given preference over what video footage shows, that an upright posture and acne are sufficient reasons for a cop to suspect you of wrongdoing, that police can stop and search a driver based solely on an anonymous tip, and that police officers have every right to shoot first and ask questions later if they feel threatened.
Are you outraged yet?
You should be. So what are you waiting for? Get out there and right these wrongs.
Stop waiting patiently for change to happen, stop waiting for some politician to rescue you, and take responsibility for your freedoms: start by fixing what’s broken in your lives, in your communities, and in this country.
Get mad, get outraged, get off your duff and get out of your house, get in the streets, get in people’s faces, get down to your local city council, get over to your local school board, get your thoughts down on paper, get your objections plastered on protest signs, get your neighbors, friends and family to join their voices to yours, get your representatives to pay attention to your grievances, get your kids to know their rights, get your local police to march in lockstep with the Constitution, get your media to act as watchdogs for the people and not lapdogs for the corporate state, get your act together, and get your house in order.
Appearances to the contrary, this country does not belong exclusively to the corporations or the special interest groups or the oligarchs or the war profiteers or any particular religious, racial or economic demographic.
This country belongs to all of us: each and every one of us—“we the people”—but most especially, this country belongs to those of us who love freedom enough to stand and fight for it.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are fast approaching the point at which we will have nothing left to lose.
Don’t wait for things to get that bad before you find your voice and your conscience. By then, it will be too late.
As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s character reflects in The Gulag Archipelago:
How we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if … during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Take your stand now—using every nonviolent means at your disposal—while you still can.
Don’t wait to reflect back on missed opportunities to push back against tyranny.
Don’t wait until you’re the last one standing.
Time is running out.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 22:25 - Coal Shipping In US Industrial Heartland Collapses To 35-Year Low
Coal Shipping In US Industrial Heartland Collapses To 35-Year Low
President Trump vowed to make “Coal Great Again” and restore the industrial heartland. But it seems as Trump’s many campaign promises to coal miners have been broken, as there’s hardly a peep from the administration about the imploding industry.
Take, for instance, a new report from A.P. News, that details how Twin Ports of Duluth-Superior, recorded its lowest coal cargo volumes in three decades during the 2019 shipping season.
Greg Nemet, a public affairs professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said coal shipments in the port have plunged as the demand for renewable energy has soared in recent years.
“It’s really a competition between coal, natural gas, and renewables. It’s cheaper to make electricity with natural gas and with solar,” Nemet said. “Coal really can’t compete with either of those.”
A.P. said 8 million tons of coal moved through the Twin Ports, the lowest volume since 1985.
U.S. coal production has plunged from 1.2 billion tons in 2008 to 597 million last year. Despite Trump’s promises to revive the industry, production continues to decline.
Trump was silent last year after a significant bankruptcy wave devastated the industry.
Deteriorating coal industry fundamentals and escalating environmental, social and governance concerns, led to the recent bankruptcy of Peabody, the world’s largest coal producer.
Trump routinely pumped the coal industry, calling it “indestructible” and telling everyone on social media that “coal is back.” Here he is in 2017 famously telling people that “We are going to put our coal miners back to work.”
And to make matters worse for miners, the Trump administration isn’t about saving the industry:
“Coal as a percentage of U.S. electricity generation is declining and will probably continue to decline for some time,” Sec. Dan Brouillette told the Atlantic Council. “The effort that we’re undertaking is not to subsidize the industry and preserve their status, if you will, as a large electricity generator. It is simply to make the product cleaner and to look for alternative uses for this product.”
The hopes of a coal rebound were all for election purposes. The industry is imploding, as it’s clear that, according to Trump, the stock market is more important than the real economy.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 22:05 - Chinese Province Authorizes Private Property Confiscation To Fight Covid-19
Chinese Province Authorizes Private Property Confiscation To Fight Covid-19
Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity.
You can now pay $2500 to be told you’re racist
Are you a liberal white woman who wants to pay money to be told that, deep down, you’re subconsciously racist?
If so, you’re in luck!
A new group called “Race to Dinner” is giving you the opportunity to pay $2,500 to host a dinner (you also have to provide the food), where you and your white friends will be told how racist you are.
The group’s founders (one of whom is black, the other identifies as Native American) write on their website to ALL white women: “We are talking about your complicity in upholding white supremacy and keeping Black and brown women down.”
Further, the founders refuse to ‘help’ women who voted for Trump, as they are beyond repair, as well as white men. They say, “White men are never going to change anything. If they were, they would have done it by now.”
Their website also posts videos hosted by the group’s “resident white woman” where viewers can learn how to ‘deconstruct their whiteness’.
Click here for the full story.
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82 year old sentenced to nearly six months in jail for playing loud music
An 82 year old British man, Ian Trainer, likes to listen to the radio.
But he’s hard of hearing, so he turns up the volume.
A neighbor was so annoyed by this that he secured a restraining order forbidding Trainer from playing music louder than 65 decibels. (For reference, 60 decibels is considered normal for background music, and 65 decibels is about the upper reach of a loud conversation.)
But Ian Trainer kept playing his music too loud. It’s possible the hard-of-hearing man couldn’t barely hear the music otherwise. And health conditions keep him from being able to wear headphones.
For violating the conditions of his restraining order, Trainer was hauled in front of a judge and sentenced to 24 weeks– almost six months– in jail.
Click here for the full story.
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42 gang members arrested in Spain for… conspiracy to recycle?
Most gangs make their money through extortion, or trafficking drugs and weapons.
But a gang in Spain has been busted for illegal recycling.
42 members of the “cardboard mafia” were arrested for taking garbage and refuse from recycling bins around Madrid, and selling the materials to recycling facilities in China and India.
After a five month investigation, the police claim the gang ‘stole’ €16 million worth of recycling materials since 2015.
In addition to stealing discarded cardboard, the gang was charged with shipping waste materials without permission.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
Chinese Province approves taking private property to fight Coronavirus
The Standing Committee of the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress has authorized the government in the region to confiscate private property as needed to fight the Coronavirus outbreak.
Authorities can now “requisition houses, facilities, materials, etc. as an emergency epidemic prevention response when necessary.”
This is a departure from reforms which strengthened private property rights in China over the last decades.
Can’t let a good crisis go to waste.
Click here for the full story.
* * *
And to continue learning how to ensure you thrive no matter what happens next in the world, I encourage you to download our free Perfect Plan B Guide.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 21:45 - India's Modi Is Building Trump's Wall (But It's Not What You Think)
India's Modi Is Building Trump's Wall (But It's Not What You Think)
India is building Trump’s wall.
Not that wall — but a wall specifically being erected as part of his first ever presidential visit to India set for February 24 to 25, where he and the First Lady will meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “strengthen the United States-India strategic partnership,” according to a White House statement.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Trump during a prior White House visit, via Reuters. Trump will see “his wall” when he visits Ahmedabad in western India, the largest city in the state of Gujarat (Modi’s home state), where he’ll join Modi in inaugurating the prime minister’s dream project — the massive new Motera Stadium — dubbed world’s largest cricket stadium.
Millions are expected to be lining the roads of the city during the visit, but what the president won’t see are the nearby slums.
Reuters reports he’ll be “shielded from the sight of slums by a newly built wall when he visits the city of Ahmedabad” —despite Indian officials’ claim it’s actually being build for “security reasons, not to conceal the slum district.” It’s also officially being described as a “beatification” project.
The wall is being hastily built around the clock and will be 400 meters long and seven feet high, concealing a slum district which houses about 800 families from view of the road that runs from the airport.
Construction workers build a wall along a slum area in Ahmedabad, via Reuters. The government, Reuters says further, “did not want the slum to be seen” when Trump passes by while en route from Ahmedabad’s airport.
US President Donald Trump on his upcoming visit to India & his event at Ahmedabad’s Motera Stadium: I am (going to India). He (PM Modi) said we’ll have millions & millions of people. He thinks we’ll have 5-7 million people just from the airport to the new stadium (Motera Stadium) pic.twitter.com/73AVHExdIh
— ANI (@ANI) February 12, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
“I’ve been ordered to build a wall as soon as possible, over 150 masons are working round-the-clock to finish the project,” the contractor said.
Trump has boasted that a whopping some 5 to 7 million people are expected to show up to greet him as he drives from the airport to the new stadium.
The newly built Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad, via Ummid.com. Despite some recent somewhat strained economic tensions related to New Delhi’s imposition of retaliatory trade tariffs following the US nixing India’s duty-free benefits on up to $5.6 billion of annual exports to the US, the US-India relationship has been overall solid, with Trump and Mohdi in the past years appearing to have a warm and close friendship.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 21:25 - 7 Charts To Love On Valentine's Day
7 Charts To Love On Valentine's Day
Authored by Bilal Hafeez via MacroHive.com,
It’s easy to paint gloomy pictures of the world whether looking at market valuations, climate change or health scares. However, not all is lost, there are some things to appreciate. So I thought given it is Valentine’s Day, I’d find seven charts to love:
(1) Odds of US Recession This Year Are Low
When the US yield curve inverted last year, there was a panic amongst investors about an imminent US recession. And while recession odds did rise, they haven’t further increased since then (Chart 1). Most models have the odds at around 25%-30%, and if anything they seem to be edging lower. Moreover, they remain comfortably below the 50% threshold seen before the last few recessions.
Chart 1: US Recession Probabilities Starting to Subside
Source: Macro Hive, Bloomberg
(2) US Equities May Not Be At Valuation Extremes
Many are concerned about US equity valuations. Even with contracting earnings last year, they continued to rally. In the past, we have used the “Warren Buffet valuation” indicator, which compares US stocks to US GDP, as a signal of how expensive US stocks are. However, given that many US companies, especially the larger tech ones, are global in nature, it would perhaps make more sense to compare US stocks to world GDP. When we do that, valuations no longer look as extreme as they did in the early 2000s or indeed in the 1960s (Chart 2).
Chart 2: Modified Warren Buffet Valuation Indicator: S&P 500 to World GDP
Source: Macro Hive, IMF, OECD, Bloomberg
(3) Many Euro Haters, But Not in Europe
It’s easy to criticise the EU and especially the euro. How can a single currency survive without a single fiscal policy. Yet for all of its faults, the most recent surveys of Europeans find that they have record support for the currency (Chart 3).
Chart 3: Having the Euro is a Good or Bad Thing for the EU (% – EURO AREA)
Source: European Commission
(4) Everyone Loves Merkel
Another positive about Europe is that the world seems to like its leaders. A recent survey of people around the world found that Germany’s Merkel and France’s Macron were viewed as the most trusted leaders to do the right thing for the world. Unfortunately, President Trump did not fare so well, with Putin beating him to third place (Chart 4).
Chart 4: Confidence in World Leaders to do the Right Thing
Source: Macro Hive, Pew
(5) China has Dramatically Slowed its CO2 Emissions
The rise of China has come with a rise in its polluting potential. However, there is some good news, after a surge in CO2 emissions in the 2000s, the growth in emissions has slowed sharply in recent years. Hopefully, the growth rate will soon turn negative.
Chart 5: China’s Growth in CO2 Emissions is Slowing
Source: Macro Hive, BP
(6) Japan’s Elderly Like to Work
A country with a shrinking and ageing population needs all the help it can get to maintain its supply of workers. Thankfully, the elderly are stepping up. The unemployment rate amongst the 65+ demographic is the lowest amongst all age groups within Japan. And also it is noticeably lower than other countries like the US (Chart 6).
Chart 6: Japan’s Elderly Like to Work
Source: Macro Hive, Bloomberg
(7) Online Dating Leads to Marriage
I couldn’t resist on Valentine’s Day to sneak in something on relationships. Somewhat surprisingly recent surveys have found that a significant proportion of online daters do find love on platforms. It gives some hope for humanity that dating apps aren’t as bad as they may first appear.
Chart 7: Share of Online US Daters Who Find Long-term Partner or Marriage on Platform
Source: Macro Hive, Pew
* * *
Bilal Hafeez is the CEO and Editor of Macro Hive. He spent over twenty years doing research at big banks – JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Nomura, where he had various “Global Head” roles and did FX, rates and cross-markets research.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 21:05 - Mexico To Unload Presidential Jet, Sells $80 Million Of Raffle Tickets To Super Rich
Mexico To Unload Presidential Jet, Sells $80 Million Of Raffle Tickets To Super Rich
Everyone thought Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) was absolutely nuts when he wanted to unload the luxurious presidential plane.
However, there were no buyers earlier this year, so he floated the idea of raffling the jet off with 6 million lottery tickets, for about $27 each, which would raise about $130 million. Though that idea never came into fruition, instead this week, AMLO sold 75 raffle tickets to the super-rich of Mexico, raising about $80 million, reported Bloomberg.
The jackpot is for the country’s version of Air Force One, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner ordered in 2012. Mexico agreed to pay Boeing $219 million for the plane new, has already lost a $139 million.
AMLO said the money raised would be used to fund new medical equipment in the country.
“Yesterday, in the gathering we had with business leaders of Mexico, everyone expressed their support,” AMLO said at a press conference Thursday. “Some will distribute the tickets to other companies. They’ll be in charge of distribution. Others will sell them, and others will hand them out to their employees.”
AMLO has said the prior administration was foolish to spend an excessive amount of money on the Dreamliner, adding that it doesn’t make sense to have a state-of-the-art plane when millions of people in the country can barely make ends meet.
There was no word on when the raffle will be drawn. But it seems that some super-rich businessperson will be the owner of a Dreamliner in the near term.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 20:45 - Harvard Expert Warns, Coronavirus Likely Just Now "Gathering Steam"
Harvard Expert Warns, Coronavirus Likely Just Now "Gathering Steam"
Authored by Alvin Powell via The Harvard Gazette,
The number of confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus have continued to surge inside China, sickening tens of thousands, with a death toll of more than 1,000. But outside the Asian giant the numbers remain a fraction of that, a trend Harvard’s Marc Lipsitch views with suspicion.
Lipsitch thinks it is just a matter of time before the virus spreads widely internationally, which means nations so far only lightly hit should prepare for its eventual arrival in force and what may seem like the worst flu season in modern times.
Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and head of the School’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, talked to the Gazette about recent developments in the outbreak and provided a look ahead.
Q&A with Marc Lipsitch
GAZETTE: We spoke about the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak about a week and a half ago. What do we know now that we didn’t know then?
LIPSITCH: We know that the spread is even greater than it was then. It was likely then that it would spread more widely, but there was still hope for containment. I think now that it’s in more countries — even Singapore, which is really good at tracing cases, has found some cases that aren’t linked to previous known cases — it’s clear that there are probably many cases in countries where we haven’t yet found them. This is really a global problem that’s not going to go away in a week or two.
GAZETTE: You indicated that the rapid increase in cases was largely due to existing cases that hadn’t been diagnosed rather than new infections. Is that still your sense, or is some of the daily increase in cases due to new transmission?
LIPSITCH: It’s clearly partly due to new transmission — and it was partly due to new transmission then. Separating out reporting delays from new transmission is hard, but over the last few days, it appears that the rate of increase in new cases in China has slowed relative to the exponential growth we saw before. Some people are cautiously hopeful that that’s due to the success of control measures rather than the inability to count many cases. I think that’s possible, since the control measures have been rather extreme in some places. So, now the question is whether these control measures are working or whether we’re mostly seeing a saturation in their ability to test thousands of cases.
GAZETTE: When we talk about control measures, I think the one that’s most obvious to people who are following this are the quarantines. Are there other things going on that are also important?
LIPSITCH: For the cutting off of Wuhan, cordon sanitaire is probably a better word for it because the movement restrictions apply to everybody, not just the exposed people. They’re not exactly quarantined. Then there’s the quarantine of people who are sick and may or may not have the coronavirus, along with the isolation of people who have the coronavirus. All of that may be helping. We’ve had some concerns based on news reports that the way they’re doing the bulk quarantine and isolation of cases could be harmful in China, but it’s very hard to get a clear answer on what exactly is being done. The early reports said that they were taking people who were confirmed corona cases and putting them together in mass quarters with people who were not confirmed as corona but might have a fever or respiratory symptoms. If that was true, that could spread the virus further. Since then, I’ve heard a number of times that that’s not actually true. So I don’t know what to think of that. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing a responsible public health agency would do.
GAZETTE: Has it become apparent that the virus is either easier to transmit or more deadly than previously thought? Or are these increasing case and fatality numbers in line with what our thinking was a week ago?
LIPSITCH: The ease of transmission is still being confirmed. In terms of the so-called “R-nought,” or how many secondary cases a single case infects, experts’ assessment is getting tighter around a level of transmissibility that’s perhaps lower than SARS, which was about 3 and higher than pandemic flu, which can be up to about 2. But what makes this one perhaps harder to control than SARS is that it may be possible to transmit before you are sick, or before you are very sick — so it’s hard to block transmission by just isolating confirmed cases.
GAZETTE: Is that the most concerning new information, that it might be transmissible before symptoms are apparent? That would seem to make this a lot trickier.
LIPSITCH: Yes. I think that’s the most concerning piece, but the evidence for that so far in the public domain is pretty limited. I’ve seen hints that aren’t published yet, but the evidence for that that’s been peer reviewed is quite limited. On severity, estimates are that it’s worse than seasonal flu, where about one in 1,000 infected cases die, and it’s not as bad as SARS, where 8 or 9 percent of infected cases died. I’ve been working with some colleagues on estimates. They’re preliminary still but bounded by those two. That’s a large range, however, so the important question is where the final figure ends up, because 3 or 4 percent of cases dying would be much more worrisome than 0.4 percent.
GAZETTE: Is it significant that there are so few cases internationally compared with the number in China? Is that an indication that control measures are working or is it just gathering steam internationally?
LIPSITCH: Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely to be that it’s gathering steam. We’ve released a preprint that we’ve been discussing publicly — and trying to get peer reviewed in the meantime — that looks at the numbers internationally, based on how many cases you would expect from normal travel volumes. And a couple of things are striking. One is that there are countries that really should be finding cases and haven’t yet, like Indonesia and maybe Cambodia. They are outside the range of uncertainty you would expect even given variability between countries. So our best guess is that there are undetected cases in those countries. Indonesia said a couple of days ago that it had done 50 tests, but it has a lot of air travel with Wuhan, let alone the rest of China. So 50 tests is not enough to be confident you’re catching all the cases. That’s one bit of evidence that to me was really striking. Second, I was reading The Wall Street Journal that Singapore had three cases so far that were not traced to any other case. Singapore is the opposite of Indonesia, in that they have more cases than you would expect based on their travel volume, probably because they’re better at detection. And even they are finding cases that they don’t have a source for. That makes me think that many other places do as well. Of course, we’re making guesses from limited information, but I think they’re pretty likely to be correct guesses, given the totality of information.
GAZETTE: People have said a vaccine is probably at least a year away. Do you have a sense that this is going to need a vaccine to finally bring it under control?
LIPSITCH: That seems like the scenario which is most plausible to me right now. Vaccine efforts are very much needed, but I think we should be clear that they won’t necessarily succeed. There’s a lot of effort being put into them, but not every disease has a vaccine. [Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said Tuesday that a vaccine could be ready in 18 months, according to CNN.]
GAZETTE: But what is most important for the public to know about this?
LIPSITCH: There’s likely to be a period of widespread transmission in the U.S., and I hope we will avert the kind of chaos that some other places are seeing. That’s likely if we continue to be prepared, but I think it’s going to be a new virus that we have to deal with. That won’t be because the United States government has failed to contain it, it will mean that this is an uncontainable virus. If we’re dealing with it, it’s because everybody’s going to be dealing with it. I think that’s a likely scenario.
GAZETTE: From a treatment standpoint, it seems there are a lot of mild cases and then fewer serious cases that need respiratory support. Should hospitals and the medical establishment start thinking about capacity-building now?
LIPSITCH: To the extent that’s possible, yes, but I don’t know how flexible that capacity is. I think we should be prepared for the equivalent of a very, very bad flu season, or maybe the worst-ever flu season in modern times, since we’ve had ventilators and been able to provide intensive respiratory support. And it might not be real flu “season” because the annual flu season is already passing. One question I’ve gotten a lot is whether it will go away in warmer weather, like SARS did. I’m not at all convinced that SARS went away because of the warmer weather. I think it went away because people got it under control in May and June. But there is some evidence — and we’re working on quantifying it — that coronaviruses do transmit less efficiently in the warmer weather. So it’s possible that we will get some help from that, but I don’t think that will solve the problem, as evidenced by the fact that there’s transmission in Singapore, on the equator.
GAZETTE: Once people get this and recover, do we know whether they will have immunity?
LIPSITCH: That is a very important question, but we don’t know the answer yet because it’s been too short a time. The evidence from other coronaviruses is that there is some immunity but it doesn’t last for long. Immunity to the seasonal coronaviruses lasts for maybe a couple of years, and then you can get reinfected. There’s a further question of whether that’s because the virus is changing or because your immunity is not very durable. Given that it’s a new virus, we can’t say anything with certainty, but it would be reasonable to expect immunity to be somewhat short-lived, meaning a couple of years, rather than lifelong.
GAZETTE: So without a vaccine, you may have a respite for a year or two but then you may get it again?
LIPSITCH: Yes, and that is a bit like the flu, although typically people get the flu every five or six years.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 20:25 - Online Trading Academy Sued By FTC For Bilking Boomers Out Of $370 Million
Online Trading Academy Sued By FTC For Bilking Boomers Out Of $370 Million
An investment training program called Online Trading Academy (OTA) collected $370 million for classes over six years, misleading predominantly baby boomers in how to time the stock market.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday, Feb 12, charged the California-based operation for overstating how easy it was to make money from their exclusive trading system.
The FTC said retirement-age students paid up to $50k for classes, with promises that these folks could “invest like the pros on Wall Street. No matter your experience and goals,” people were swindled out of tens of thousands of dollars by being told OTA had a “proven” strategy was “designed to make money in any market, whether it’s going up or down.”
OTA has ten academies plus 31 franchised locations across the country and in the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Singapore, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The FTC alleges that OTA lured in potential boomers by enticing them with $299, three-day “orientation,” where sales agents would push more classes that would cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The FTC said OTA couldn’t support its claims of ‘trading riches’ – indicating that a company survey showed just 3% of people who responded claimed to be making “a lot of money,” 31% reported making “a little money,” and 66% said they were “making no money at all.”
“It is illegal to make earnings claims in marketing investment opportunities or training unless the seller has a reasonable basis for making such claims,” said Andrew Smith, director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. OTA “used unfounded earnings claims to bilk Americans out of their savings.”
It should be noted that day trading for a living or gambling your retirement savings is a dangerous business.
A study from the Social Science Research Network titled Day Trading for a Living?, published last fall, found 97% of Brazilian day traders lost money.
The most successful day trading technique over the last decade has been crafted by the Federal Reserve flooding markets with an unprecedented amount of liquidity, resulting in the “buy the (f*cking) dip” (BTFD).
BTFD works well when the Fed is expanding its balance sheet, but as we found out on Thursday, term repo is expected to decline next month, so maybe BTFD becomes exhausted…
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 20:05 - John Brennan Under DOJ Scrutiny, As John Durham's Criminal Investigation Expands
John Brennan Under DOJ Scrutiny, As John Durham's Criminal Investigation Expands
Authored by Sara Carter via SaraACarter.com,
U.S. Attorney John Durham – charged with the criminal probe into the FBI’s Russia investigation of the Trump campaign – has been questioning CIA officials closely involved with John Brennan’s 2017 intelligence community assessment regarding direct Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to U.S. officials.
In May 2017, Brennan denied during a hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that its agency relied on the now debunked Christopher Steele dossier for the Intelligence Community Assessment report. He told then Congressman Trey Gowdy “we didn’t” use the Steele dossier.
“It wasn’t part of the corpus of intelligence information that we had,” Brennan stated.
“It was not in any way used as a basis for the Intelligence Community assessment that was done. It was — it was not.”
However, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed in his report that the dossier was used in the Obama administration’s 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA). As stated in the IG report, there were discussions by top intelligence officials as to whether the Steele dossier should be included in the ICA report.
But upon careful inspection of Horowitz’s report, on page 179, investigators ask former FBI Director James Comey if he discussed the dossier with Brennan and whether or not it should be given to President Obama. According to the report, Comey told investigators that Brennan said it was “important” enough to include in the ICA — clearly part of the “corpus of intelligence information” they had.
According to a recent report by The New York Times, Durham’s probe is specifically looking at that January 2017 intelligence community assessment, which concluded with “high confidence” that Russian President Vladimir Putin “ordered an influence campaign in 2016.”
“Mr. Durham appears to be pursuing a theory that the C.I.A., under its former director John O. Brennan, had a preconceived notion about Russia or was trying to get to a particular result — and was nefariously trying to keep other agencies from seeing the full picture lest they interfere with that goal, the people said.”
Sources with knowledge have said CIA officials questioned by Durham’s investigative team “are extremely concerned with the investigation and the direction it’s heading.”
Brennan’s assessment stated that Putin wanted to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate former Secretary of State [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.” It also stated that Putin “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
But not everyone agreed with Brennan. The NSA then under retired Adm. Mike Rogers stated it only had “moderate confidence” that Putin tried to help Trump’s election. As stated in the New York times Durham is investigating whether Brennan was keeping other intelligence agencies out of the loop to keep his narrative that Putin was helping Trump’s campaign public.
“I wouldn’t call it a discrepancy, I’d call it an honest difference of opinion between three different organizations, and, in the end, I made that call,” Rogers told the Senate in May 2017.
“It didn’t have the same level of sourcing and the same level of multiple sources.”
According to The Times Durham is reviewing emails from the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency analysts who worked on the January, 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russia’s interference in the election.
Durham’s office could not be reached for comment. DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec also could not be reached for comment.
However, Brennan told MSNBC’s “Hardball” last week, that Durham’s questioning is dangerous.
“It’s kind of silly,” he said.
“Is there a criminal investigation now on analytic judgments and the activities of C.I.A. in terms of trying to protect our national security? I’m certainly willing to talk to Mr. Durham or anybody else who has any questions about what we did during this period of 2016.”
Durham And FBI Spy Stefan Halper
Durham’s investigation appear to have many tentacles. For example, he has expanded his probe to the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. According to sources who spoke to SaraACarter.com he is carefully scrutinizing money paid through the office to former FBI confidential informant Cambridge academic Stefan Halper. Halper, who worked in previous U.S. administrations and is an academic, is connected to three of President Donald Trump’s campaign officials that were wrapped up into the FBI’s probe, most notably Carter Page.
Halper, along with others such as former MI6 Chief Sir Richard Dearlove, founded the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, in England at Cambridge University. According to several sources, Durham has questioned officials at the Office of Net Assessment about Halper’s contracts, how the money was utilized and what agency actually awarded the contract.
Further, Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is also investigating the over $1 million in contracts Halper received from the ONA, as first reported at SaraACarter.com. It is, of course, a separate investigation from Durham’s but on the same issues.
The Office Of Net Assessment, according to sources with knowledge, is sometimes used as a front to pay contractors, like Halper, who are conducting work for U.S. intelligence agencies. It is for this reason, that Durham is investigating the flow of money that Halper received and whether or not agencies other than the FBI were involved in the investigation into Trump’s campaign and whether or not, the contracts were accurately accounted for in the reports received by Grassley.
Durham’s criminal investigation into the FBI, CIA, as well as private entities is ongoing. Known by its acronym ONA, the secretive office is run by Director James Baker, who has been in the role since being appointed by the Obama Administration in 2015. In a January letter to Baker, Grassley asks a litany of questions as to Halper’s role within ONA, his contracts, his foreign contacts and whether the FBI, or CIA, used the ONA office to pay Halper for spying on Trump campaign personnel.
“Can ONA state for certain that Halper did not use taxpayer money provided by DoD to recruit, or attempt to recruit, sources for the FBI investigation into the now-debunked theory of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Grassley asks Baker.
But it is Halper’s role overseas and concern that the CIA may have been involved that is leading to more questions than answers.
In 2016, in what appeared to be an unexpected move, Halper left the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar. He told papers in London – at the time – that it was due to “unacceptable Russian influence.”
Ironically, documents obtained by SaraACarter.com suggest that during Halper’s tenure with the seminar, he had also invited senior Russian intelligence officials to co-teach his course on several occasions. Further, according to news reports, he also accepted money to finance the course from a top Russian oligarch with ties to Putin.
Several course syllabi from 2012 and 2015 obtained by this outlet reveal Hapler had invited and co-taught his course on intelligence with the former Director of Russian Intelligence Gen. I. Vyacheslav Trubnikov.
Moreover, the New York Times recent report suggests that Durham’s probe into Brennan is also looking closely at an alleged secret source said to have direct ties to the Kremlin. It is not certain if the same secret Kremlin source discussed by Brennan is the same source used by Halper in his reports.
However, there is evidence that Halper had similar sources to former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, who compiled the dossier. Based on hand written notes from an interview the State Department’s Kathleen Kavalec states two of Steele’s dossier sources; “Trubnikov” and “Surkov.”
Interesting, isn’t it.
Surkov is Vladislav Surkov, an aide of Vladimir Putin who is on the U.S.’s list of sanctioned individuals, and Trubnikov is none other than Vyacheslav Trubnikov. Trubnikov was the First Deputy of Foreign Minister of Russia and he formally served as the Director of Foreign Intelligence Service. He is also a source of Halper.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 19:45 - Chaos Is Coming: US To Start Testing People With Flu Symptoms
Chaos Is Coming: US To Start Testing People With Flu Symptoms
Brace for chaos: in a few weeks, the next person to sneeze may be
arrestedquietly pulled aside by the authorities and tested for coronavirus.People in the US experiencing flu-like symptoms will be screened for the latest coronavirus that originated from China, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced during a briefing on Friday, adding that it will roll out 5 labs, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, to screen patients through the ominously sounding “national flu surveillance program”; if that wasn’t bad enough, they also said the program is likely to expand as more confirmed cases are expected in the coming days and weeks.
Justifying the move, CDC officials said that there could be undetected cases of the mysterious illness in communities across the US, as the country experiences a dramatic spike in flu as the season approaches its halfway point.
The agency plans to expand to more cities until it has achieved “national surveillance”.
“They are currently testing for influenza. The idea is they will test the influenza negative specimens,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. There are now 15 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the US and more than 600 people remain in quarantine.
Which, of course is a prudent move, if only it weren’t for the fact that tens of millions of Americans are about to get sick as we enter the peak of flu season, and every sneeze or cough will lead to panicked phone calls to the local ER (or police), and potentially in self-imposed quarantine as more and more Americans await an “all clear” signal before life returns back to normal. Alas, with the coronavirus pandemic running rampang in China, this may not happen for many month.
Global cases of the virus have topped 64,000, including hundreds of health workers in China as it battles to contain the virus following its outbreak in Wuhan. In the US, there have been 15th confirmed coronavirus infections while more than 1,300 people have died in China (it would have been even more had China not somehow “double-counted” the dead).
The latest case in the US involves a patient who was among a group of people under a federal quarantine order in Texas following a US government-chartered flight that evacuated US citizens from China earlier this month.
Meanwhile, health officials report 26 million flu infections in the US so far this season, including 14,000 deaths.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 19:25 - China Sends 25,000 Medical Personnel To Hubei As 'War Time Conditions' Take Effect
China Sends 25,000 Medical Personnel To Hubei As 'War Time Conditions' Take Effect
Summary:
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China has sent 217 medical rescue groups totaling 25,633 personnel to Hubei province to fight the outbreak.
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First case reported in Africa after the Egyptian Health Ministry confirms non-Egyptian patient who recently traveled to China
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Hubei health officials report 2,420 new cases and 139 new deaths for Feb. 14
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NHC officials report an additional 4 deaths and 2,641 cases.
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China warns of incoming case surge
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China says 1,716 medical workers have been infected
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WHO demands to know more about sick doctors, insists group of 12 virus experts will reach Beijing over the weekend
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Singapore reports largest daily jump in cases amid increased human-to-human transmission
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Egypt confirms first case; virus now present in 29 countries/territories
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Hong Kong reports 3 new cases
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New quarantine measures take effect in Wuhan
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President Xi touts new “biosecurity law”
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Hong Kong Disney land offers space for quarantine
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Chinese company says blood plasma of recovered patients useful in combating the virus
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US mulling new travel restrictions
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Japan reports 4 new cases; one patient recently returned from Hawaii.
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CDC Director: Virus is “Coming” to the US.
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5 presumptive cases reported in British Columbia
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Toll of infected passengers and crew aboard ‘the Diamond Princess’ climbs to 218
* * *
Update (2200ET): China has sent 217 medical rescue groups totaling 25,633 medical rescue personnel to Hubei province, 20,374 of whom are from local areas, according to the Global Times. This exceeds the number sent to support the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake which killed over 80,000 people.
* * *
Update (1900ET): The NHC has followed up the officials from Hubei with revised nation-wide figures.
Nationwide, officials reported another 4 deaths, and another 2,641 cases, bringing the nationwide total as of end of day Friday to 66,492.
- CHINA HAD 143 DEATHS FROM CORONAVIRUS FEB. 14, STATEMENT SAYS
- CHINA ADDS 2,641 NEW CONFIRMED CORONAVIRUS CASES ON FEB. 14
- CHINA SAYS TOTAL CORONAVIRUS CASES RISE TO 66,492
* * *
Update (1800ET): Here are the confirmed numbers out of Hubei for Feb. 14, Ying Yong’s first day as the province’s new party chief.
Offering less information than usual (just figures on new cases and deaths), health officials from the province reported 2,420 new cases and 139 new deaths.
- CHINA’S HUBEI PROVINCE REPORTS 139 CORONAVIRUS DEATHS FEB. 14
- CHINA’S HUBEI TOTAL CORONAVIRUS CONFIRMED CASES RISE TO 54,406
Friday marked the beginning of ‘war time’ conditions in Wuhan, accompanied by a total ban on leaving one’s dwelling for any reason other than a government-authorized service or to receive treatment.
* * *
Update (1650ET): On Friday morning, Japanese health officials confirmed four new cases of the coronavirus, including one individual who had recently visited the US state of Hawaii.
We must admit, we were a little alarmed when we saw that, but with no additional information about the timing or circumstances of this alleged visit, we didn’t really get into it.
Another one of the recent cases in Japan is the son of the first woman who succumbed to the virus in the country. He works as a taxi driver, and was reportedly ferrying people around before his symptoms emerged, raising fears that he could have infected others.
The Mainichi, a national newspaper in Japan, said the government will carry out tests on some 100 people, including around 80 party attendees, who came into close contact with the taxi driver. Already, around 10 have complained of symptoms like fevers or coughs.
So far, more than 250 people in Japan, including 218 passengers and crew from ‘the Diamond Princess’, have already been confirmed to be infected.
Still, Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said there is “no reason for changing the government position that it has yet to reach a state of epidemic in Japan.”
Looks like the government was smart to separate out the cruise ship numbers from the total cases confirmed in Japan.
But for Americans, this is the most disturbing passage from the Mainichi story.
In Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, a man in his 60s who recently returned from a trip to Hawaii has tested positive for the coronavirus, the city government said. He has not visited China recently.
In cases reported Thursday in the western prefecture of Wakayama, a route of contraction is not known, either.
Is it possible that he could have picked up the virus in Hawaii, a popular vacation destination for Chinese and Japanese travelers? It might be unlikely, but one never knows.
Ummm, Hawaii🍍? “In Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, a man in his 60s who recently returned from a trip to Hawaii has tested positive for the coronavirus, the city govt said. He has not visited China recently.” Need more details on this #COVID19 🦠 case. https://t.co/TIEW41xOri
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 14, 2020
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* * *
Update (1545ET): For anybody who hoped Wednesday’s surge in new cases and deaths in Wuhan might have been a one off – we’re sorry to disappoint.
Unfortunately, it looks like the data dump (which was blamed on a pro forma death accounting) was only the beginning. Because Chinese health officials warned Friday afternoon that despite a drop on Thursday, they expect a “surge” of cases in the coming days.
Chinese experts said that there may be a surge on #COVID19 confirmed recently as more cities outside #Wuhan in Hubei include clinically diagnosed cases and medical staff may face more pressure. https://t.co/mdTHXseTac pic.twitter.com/VxTXudTzpm
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 14, 2020
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Hubei confirmed 4,823 new cases on Thursday, including 3,095 cases diagnosed via X-Ray or CAT scan showing evidence of pneumonia. That was a sudden plunge from the previous day’s total of 14,840 new cases including 13,332 clinically diagnosed cases. On Thursday, 116 deaths were reported in Hubei, down from Wednesday’s 242.
And as the lockdown in Wuhan intensifies…
Whatever you have done, or whoever you are , do you deserve being treated like this? One of the many scenes in #China during #CoronavirusOutbreak 一场#武汉肺炎 疫情，将多少的丑陋展现在世人眼前。#新冠肺炎 #全民反抗 #全民自救 #全民互救 pic.twitter.com/PG6rJyl2a2
— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 14, 2020
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Girl wailing when mother’s body driven away. Her father already died 20 days ago. One of the many scenes in #China during the #coronavirusoutbreak #COVID_2019 妈妈被拉走了，爸爸 20天前也以死于 #武汉肺炎 #新冠肺炎 pic.twitter.com/FLmMHfMDx7
— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 14, 2020
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Of course, there’s little point in lying to people if you’re planning on telling them the “truth” the next day, so at least we understand the reason for the warning. But the news is breaking during the early morning hours of Saturday in China.
Back in North America, British Columbia has a presumptive fifth case, though it looks like it hasn’t yet been confirmed, according to BNO.
* * *
Update (1415ET): The Egyptian Health Ministry has announced the first coronavirus case in Egypt – the first confirmed patient on the African continent, according to the Financial Times. According to the ministry, the case was discovered through its electronic registration program to track people who have visited countries with reported infections.
The person in question is not Egyptian and is asymptomatic, but tested positive for the virus. They have been placed in isolation in a local hospital, according to the ministry.
As we reported earlier in the week, Africa – which has seen an influx of Chinese nationals in recent years (and a ton of half-Chinese babies born to single mothers) is woefully unprepared for the coronavirus.
“We’re definitely not prepared. If we had a couple of cases, it would spread very quickly,” physiotherapist Fundi Sinkala said.
“We’re doing the best we can with what resources we have.” -AP
Of note, around 1 million Chinese now live in Africa.
* * *
Update (1330ET): As we mentioned earlier during our introduction to Ying Yong, the President Xi protege and former Shanghai mayor who is now running Hubei Province for the Communist Party, the new seven more draconian quarantine measures that he’s imposing on Wuhan are taking effect.
The city reportedly announced Friday afternoon (NYC time) that the new measures had taken effect. According to BBG, residents of the city of more than 11 million where the outbreak began must now stay in their homes, except to receive treatment or provide a sanctioned government service.
Get ready for more scenes like this:
Nurse denied entry to her own home after work as the guard thinks she carries more #virus as she is a nurse. One of the many scenes in #China during #CoronavirusOutbreak.
護士下班回不了家，把門的說護士渾身上下都是病毒，更不能讓她進去。#COVID2019 #Coronavirus #武汉肺炎 #新冠肺炎 pic.twitter.com/SCUBCdYATG— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 14, 2020
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So much for getting China ‘back to work’.
* * *
Update (1200ET): Bloomberg just reported that Egypt has confirmed its first coronavirus case.
- EGYPT CONFIRMS FIRST CORONAVIRUS CASE, HEALTH MINISTRY SAYS AFFECTED PERSON IS A FOREIGNER – STATE TV
That’s the 29th country or territory to report at least one case of the coronavirus. It’s not yet clear where the patient might’ve been infected.
* * *
Update (1040ET): The WHO has just wrapped up its now-daily presser for Friday, and it appeared to focus on imminent plans to send a group of a dozen scientists and researchers to Beijing to figure out exactly what the hell is going on.
Much fuss has been made over the past week over China’s continued refusals to allow Americans, or any other foreigners, for that matter, to offer assistance with the virus response. It’s almost as if they’re…hiding something…
Even after yesterday’s big reveal about the change in their ‘pro forma accounting standards’ to reflect a higher death toll and number of confirmed cases (the jump alarmed global investors and prompted a selloff on equity markets), China still won’t let Americans participate in a WHO-sponsored team of 12 researchers who are traveling to the mainland.
It was a big deal earlier this week when Beijing said it would reluctantly accept the team, ending weeks of suspiciously standoffish behavior (though the WHO bigwigs did travel to Beijing for meetings). But as one analyst said earlier on CNBC: ‘We want to see foreign boots on the ground before we simply take the Chinese at their word’.
It’s also notable how the WHO, initially a purveyor of what seemed like propaganda hot off the presses in Beijing, seems to have turned completely against its benefactor, now treating it with public suspicion.
- WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION TEDROS SAYS WE NEED TO KNOW MORE ABOUT INFECTION OF 1,760 CHINESE HEALTH WORKERS, INCLUDING TIME PERIOD AND CIRCUMSTANCES
- WHO BOSS TEDROS SAYS HE EXPECTS FULL TEAM OF WHO-LED INTERNATIONAL HEALTH EXPERTS TO TOUCH DOWN IN CHINA OVER WEEKEND TO HELP PROBE CORONAVIRUS
- WHO MISSION TO CHINA WILL FOCUS ON UNDERSTANDING TRANSMISSION OF CORONAVIRUS, SEVERITY OF DISEASE AND IMPACT OF ONGOING RESPONSE MEASURES – WHO CHIEF TEDROS SAYS
- WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION TEDROS SAYS WE NEED TO KNOW MORE ABOUT INFECTION OF 1,760 CHINESE HEALTH WORKERS, INCLUDING TIME PERIOD AND CIRCUMSTANCES
But after today’s WHO press conference, we were left with the distinct impression that it’s almost as if China doesn’t…want the team to come.
Why else would they have waited to reveal the figures about all the sick doctors and health-care workers until Friday morning in the US and Europe? Just a thought.
Back in the US, a team of American expertss is prepared to travel to China to investigate the outbreak on a moments notice, should they ever receive clearance from a government official, according to Secretary Azar.
As he said (and we noted) earlier, the US is bracing for the possibility that the warm weather doesn’t kill the virus, as President Trump expects.
Anyway, moving away from China, we’ve seen unconfirmed reports of four patients in St. Petersburg escaping a COVID-19 quarantine. Earlier in the week, two women escaped quarantines in Siberia.
* * *
Update (1000ET): China is turning the quarantine nob up to ’11’.
After imposing strict lockdown conditions on nearly a third of the country, Beijing’s is kicking off its shift to ‘wartime measures’ by adopting even more strikingly draconian measures on the residents of its capital city.
From Feb. 14 on, all people returning to the city will be advised to quarantine for 14 days.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that hundreds of conference atendees in London have been contacted by health officials after one of them was later diagnosed with the virus.
The person, who has not been identified, attended the UK Bus Summit at the QEII Conference Centre last week. Two Labour MPs who attended the conference said they’re cancelling public events until Feb. 20, just in case.
So far, nine people in the UK have been confirmed to have the virus.
* * *
Update (0915ET): Japan has reported 4 new cases of the virus, including one man who recently returned from the US state of Hawaii, and another who helped transfer an infected patient diagnosed aboard “the Diamond Princess”, the cruise ship that has been quarantined in Yokohama for 10 days.
Meanwhile, over in the US, this interview of the director of the CDC warning that the virus could become widespread in the US ‘beyond 2020’.
* * *
Update (0850ET): Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said during an interview on Friday morning that more travel restrictions are “on the table,” suggesting that the US might apply similar restrictions to Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and other Asian countries that have reported rising numbers of cases.
Earlier this month, the State Department raised its travel alert for China to ‘4’, and the US imposed restrictions on foreigners who have recently traveled to China and re-routing Americans who have been to viral hotspots to certain US airports for screening on arrival. These travel restrictions have infuriated Beijing, and prompted a government spokesperson to accuse the US of spreading hysteria.
Even if the virus does “go away” in April, as President Trump has insisted…
“We’re seeing very limited impact here in the United States, but that could change at any time,” HHS Sec. Alex Azar says about coronavirus. “We’re working…with states, local governments and the private sector so we’re ready if it gets here.”https://t.co/Kosiam25fb pic.twitter.com/2xR0UwMuZz
— New Day (@NewDay) February 14, 2020
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…At this point, Q1 GDP is going to be a disaster anyway, so the US might as well kitchen-sink it.
And it’s not like investors have anything to worry about – bad news is still good news, after all, and the market will simply go to pricing in ~1 Fed rate hike in 2020 to ~2.
* * *
Update (0810ET): Earlier this morning, Hong Kong confirmed three more coronavirus infections, bringing the total number of cases in the city to 56.
Here’s more information on the new cases from SCMP:
- The Centre for Health Protection said one of the three cases involved a man in critical condition after suffering shortness of breath for more than 10 days. He had to be intubated in Princess Margaret Hospital. He lives in Shek Lei Estate in Kwai Chung, and passed through the Lok Ma Chau border crossing on January 22.
- Another person who tested positive for the virus, which causes the disease known as Covid-19, was the cousin of a previously infected case. Both attended a family gathering of 29 at a restaurant in North Point on January 26. At least six other members at that gathering have been infected with the new deadly virus, while at least two are still in quarantine pending test results.
- The third case is a worker in a dim sum restaurant in Sheung Wan, whose husband visited their son in Xinhui, Guangdong province, from January 23 to January 28. Her husband and son are not infected.
Unlike most of the countries that have reported cases of the virus, both Singapore and Hong Kong have confirmed human-to-human transmission within their own borders, meaning the outbreak has already started to spread past the 2nd and 3rd generations of the infected.
Though Singapore is still ahead in terms of number of cases, Hong Kong is giving it a run for its month (though, as we’ve said before, it’s an outbreak, not a race).
* * *
Following Chinese health officials’ claim last night that it “double-counted” some deaths (while crematoriums in the country have been working 24/7 as the outbreak has worsened over the last few weeks), the good people at China’s NHC have disclosed for the first time that 1,716 medical workers have been infected across the country.
Does this figure seem a little underwhelming? Officials put the infected medical worker total at 3.8% of 60k+ total cases on the mainland, and added that six medical workers – including the martyr Dr. Li – have died as of Friday. Of course, even if they’re all wearing protective gear (which we know many aren’t especially in the hardest hit areas like Hubei) this number would still seem low for such an infectious disease, given that more than 65,000 cases have been confirmed across the world.
One expert who spoke to the New York Times said the number of infected medical workers is “concerning.”
“I think it’s quite concerning,” said Benjamin Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. “Healthcare workers face the challenge of caring for a substantial number of patients in Wuhan. It’s worrying to discover that a number of them have been infected.”
From what we’ve heard and read, it seems that shortages of supplies like facemasks, gloves, goggles and other protective gear have persisted, even in Hubei, according to the NYT. During the SARS outbreak, 961 medical workers were infected, representing some 18% of all infections. Since COVID-19 is even more contagious than SARS, we’d expect the number of medical workers infected to be even higher.
After expressing skepticism about Beijing’s response to the virus earlier in the week, it looks like the WHO is back to shilling for the Communist Party, claiming overnight that the jump in cases in China shouldn’t be characterized as a “spike,” and that it’s normal to change how cases are defined.
Across the mainland, the Chinese people, who have been frustrated by the government’s dissembling, have come up with jokes like this one.
How many monkeys died?
26 caves collapsed.
How many monkeys died?
Only 5K trees ruined.
How many monkeys died?
All alive moneys transferred to safe places.
How many monkeys died?
Relatives of the dead monkeys are emotionally stable.
How many monkeys died?
We saved one today. https://t.co/KUh9O5IqiG— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 14, 2020
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Given everything we’ve learned about the virus, and all the reports about shortages of medical supplies like facemasks across the country, but especially in Hubei Province, we suspect that the real number is much, much larger. It’s just the latest evidence that Beijing hasn’t given up on doctoring its disease stats, even after its big non-admission on Thursday that its methods for confirming virus-linked cases and deaths hadn’t been sufficiently inclusive.
As we first pointed out yesterday, party officials said yesterday that the country would use “wartime measures” – a kind of public emergency declaration – to fight the virus, suggesting that the lockdowns will become even more widespread.
China fights #coronavirus with ‘wartime’ measures; Infected patient’s daughter makes desperate plea#COVID2019 #Coronavirus #CoronavirusOutbreak #coronaviruschina https://t.co/mYczlRVis1
— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 14, 2020
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And as that happens, more scenes like these are playing out across the country.
First, they covered up the truth, second, they said this disease was preventable and controllable, third, they locked you up. Now they terrify you like this. What a hell! Terrorists are on the go. #COVID2019 #Coronavirus #CoronavirusOutbreak #coronaviruschina pic.twitter.com/CuPpqRncur
— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 14, 2020
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A real time photo from David Ng’s friend in #Wuhan. Only 7 families have their lights on in a 30 level building; whilst usually every window was on. The friend’s own building has only 5 families’ lights on. How many have gone? You do your own math. #COVID19 #coronavirus https://t.co/QjVv8t0kGw
— 曾錚 Jennifer Zeng (@jenniferatntd) February 14, 2020
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In more immediately alarming news, Singapore reported nine new cases overnight, the largest daily increase yet in the city-state, which is now reporting a total of 67 cases, leaving it in third place after mainland China and the ‘Diamond Princess’ (cases quarantined off the ship are being counted separately from domestic Japanese cases).
Meanwhile, as the quest for a vaccine continues, Chinese state media is reporting that the China National Biotec Group has found virus-neutralizing antibodies in the plasma of recovered patients. Experiments have shown that these antibodies can help kill the virus, potentially speeding up the timeline for a successful vaccine.
The company said it had successfully prepared the plasma for clinical treatment after strict blood biological safety testing, virus inactivation and antiviral activity testing. The plasma had been used to treat 11 patients in critical condition, with significant results, it said.
Here’s more on that from SCMP:
Clinical tests showed that, after 12 to 24 hours of treatment, the main inflammatory indicators in the laboratory decreased significantly, the proportion of lymphocytes increased, key indicators such as blood oxygen saturation and viral load improved, and clinical signs and symptoms improved significantly.
“The plasma product to treat the novel coronavirus is made from plasma loaded with antibodies donated by recovered patients. It went through virus inactivation and was tested against virus-neutralising antibodies and multiple pathogenic microorganisms,” the company said, according to the report.
Following the scapegoating of two of the most senior party officials in Hubei, the province’s new party boss, Ying Yong, held his first meeting on the outbreak with staff late Thursday, and immediately proceeded to lay down the law: He ordered officials to redouble their efforts to tighten quarantine controls in communities and neighborhoods across the province. This includes making sure that every individual suspected of infection must be quarantined.
In other news, China’s zombie companies are breathing a sigh of relief after the Communist Party ordered the nation’s banks to implement a loan default ‘grace period’ to ensure that China’s mountain of bad debt doesn’t come tumbling down like a house of cards.
Banks are told to tolerate higher bad loans and further raise tolerance for regions and industries hit hard by the virus
As the outbreak rages unabated and China struggles to get its economy back to work, the leadership in Beijing have continued to parrot the party line that the backlash for China’s economy will remain minimal, with China’s foreign secretary becoming the latest to assure the public that the economy will swiftly recover after a brief pullback.
President Xi said Friday that the country must improve its responses to major public health crises, and added that a new “biosecurity law” would soon be passed.
Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday urged an improvement in the preventive mechanism in response to major public health crises and the country’s public health emergency and management system. Xi also stressed the importance to roll out a biosecurity law as soon as possible. pic.twitter.com/fOqxZJcRSA
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 14, 2020
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Finally, readers who enjoy a little dark humor (we suspect that’s most of you) should get a kick out of this: Disneyland Hong Kong has agreed to let the city government use its land for quarantine space.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 19:15 -
- The Biometric Threat
The Biometric Threat
Authored by Jayati Ghosh via Project Syndicate,
Around the world, governments are succumbing to the allure of biometric identification systems. To some extent, this may be inevitable, given the burden of demands and expectations placed on modern states. But no one should underestimate the risks these technologies pose.
Biometric identification systems use individuals’ unique intrinsic physical characteristics – fingerprints or handprints, facial patterns, voices, irises, vein maps, or even brain waves – to verify their identity. Governments have applied the technology to verify passports and visas, identify and track security threats, and, more recently, to ensure that public benefits are correctly distributed.
Private companies, too, have embraced biometric identification systems. Smartphones use fingerprints and facial recognition to determine when to “unlock.” Rather than entering different passwords for different services – including financial services – users simply place their finger on a button on their phone or gaze into its camera lens.
It is certainly convenient. And, at first glance, it might seem more secure: someone might be able to find out your password, but how could they replicate your essential biological features?
But, as with so many other convenient technologies, we tend to underestimate the risks associated with biometric identification systems. India has learned about them the hard way, as it has expanded its scheme to issue residents a “unique identification number,” or Aadhaar, linked to their biometrics.
Originally, the Aadhaar program’s primary goal was to manage government benefits and eliminate “ghost beneficiaries” of public subsidies. But it has now been expanded to many spheres: everything from opening a bank account to enrolling children in school to gaining admission to a hospital now requires an Aadhaar. More than 90% of India’s population has enrolled in the program.
But serious vulnerabilities have emerged. Biometric verification may seem like the ultimate tech solution, but human error creates significant risks, especially when data-collection procedures are not adequately established or implemented. In India, the government wanted to enroll a lot of people quickly in the Aadhaar program, so data collection was outsourced to small service providers with mobile machines.
If a fingerprint or iris scan is even slightly tilted or otherwise wrongly positioned, it may not match future verification scans. Moreover, bodies can change over time – for example, daily manual labor may alter fingerprints – creating discrepancies with the recorded data. And that does not even cover the most basic of mistakes, like misspelling names or addresses.
Correcting such errors can be a complicated, drawn-out process. That is a serious problem when one’s ability to collect benefits or carry out financial transactions depends on it. India has had multiple cases of lost entitlements – whether food rations or wages for public-works programs – as a result of biometric mismatches.
If honest mistakes can do that much harm, imagine the damage that can be caused by outright fraud. Police in Gujarat, India, recently found more than 1,100 casts of beneficiary fingerprints made on a silicone-like material, which were used for illicit withdrawals of food rations from the public distribution system. Because we leave fingerprints on everything we touch, we are all vulnerable to such replication.
And manual replication is just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers have created synthetic “MasterPrints” that enabled them to achieve a frighteningly high number of “imposter matches.”
Further risks arise during the transmission and storage of biometric data. Once collected, biometric data are usually moved to a central database for storage. They have to be encrypted while in transit, but the encryptions can be – and have been – hacked. Nor are they necessarily safe once they arrive in local, foreign, or cloud servers.
In India, one of the web systems used to record government employees’ work attendance was left without a password, allowing anyone access to the names, job titles, and partial phone numbers of 166,000 workers. Three official Gujarat-based websites were found to be disclosing beneficiaries’ Aadhaar numbers. And the Ministry of Rural Development accidentally exposed nearly 16 million Aadhaar numbers.
Moreover, an anonymous French security researcher accused two government websites of leaking thousands of IDs, including Aadhaar cards. That leak has now reportedly been plugged. But, given how many public and private agencies have access to the Aadhaar database, such episodes underscore how risky a supposedly secure system can be.
Of course, such vulnerabilities exist with all personal data. But exposure of someone’s biometric information is far more dangerous than exposure of, say, a password or credit card number, because it cannot be undone. We cannot, after all, simply get new irises.
The risk is compounded by efforts to use collected biometric data for monitoring and surveillance, as is occurring in China and elsewhere. In this sense, the large-scale collection and storage of people’s biometric data pose an unprecedented threat to privacy. And few countries have anything close to adequate laws to protect their residents.
In India, revelations of the Aadhaar program’s weaknesses have largely been met with official denials, rather than serious efforts to protect users. Worse, other developing countries, such as Brazil, now risk replicating these mistakes, as they rush to adopt biometric technology. And, given the large-scale data breaches that have occurred in the developed world, these countries’ citizens are not safe, either.
Biometric identification systems are permeating every facet of our lives. Unless and until citizens and policymakers recognize and address the complex security risks they entail, no one should feel safe.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 19:05 - China Admits That More Than Half A Million People Have Had "Close Contact" With The Infected
China Admits That More Than Half A Million People Have Had "Close Contact" With The Infected
Beijing’s bug push to get everybody back to work isn’t going so well. And just as health experts warned President Xi before he gave the order, the decision to try to get some of the economy churning again has simply increased the risk of the virus spreading.
After Thursday’s massive reporting of the largest increase in cases and deaths so far by a wide margin – a report made even more jarring by the fact that the WHO said just hours earlier that it expected cases in China to start to taper off, even if a super-spreader “spark” threatened to ignite a conflagration in Europe – suppressing the outbreak should be Xi’s top priority.
They can always goalseek the GDP numbers later; if the Communist Party doesn’t douse this fire now, their whole house could burn.
But amid the deluge of data that local officials in Hubei and national officials with China’s National Health Commission have released over the past week, one number appears to have slid through the cracks – until now.
VOA, a US-funded news organization operating in Asia (it’s sort of like Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Europe), has reported that 471,531 people have been decisively identified as having had “close contact” with a confirmed infected patient.
“So far, 471,531 people have been identified as having had close contact with infected patients. There are now 181,386 people under medical observation,” the Health Commission reported Thursday on its official website.
And after Thursday’s data dump, that number is almost guaranteed to rise remarkably.
Projections suggest the virus has the capability of spreading across the globe, potentially infecting as much as 80% of the global population, if left unchecked. China’s draconian quarantines have no doubt helped slow the spread, but the horse was already out of the barn before the government realized how serious the situation had become.
So far, some 60,000 cases have been confirmed worldwide, while the death toll was just under 1,400.
The coronavirus is much more contagious than SARS, even if it appears to be significantly less deadly. The ‘official’ (perhaps the most widely accepted number at this moment in time) puts the virus’s infectious capacity – its r-sub-zero, the technical term- at 2.5. That means that on average those infected will spread it to 2.5 others. But some estimates have gone up to 25.
Whatever it is, it’s allowed the virus to explode out of Hubei and infect nearly 30 countries and territories.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 18:45 - Debt, Deficits, & The Path To MMT
Debt, Deficits, & The Path To MMT
Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,
In September 2017, when the Trump Administration began promoting the idea of tax cut legislation, I wrote a series of articles discussing the fallacy that tax cuts would lead to higher tax collections, and a reduction in the deficit. To wit:
“Given today’s record-high levels of debt, the country cannot afford a deficit-financed tax cut. Tax reform that adds to the debt is likely to slow, rather than improve, long-term economic growth.
The problem with the claims that tax cuts reduce the deficit is that there is NO evidence to support the claim. The increases in deficit spending to supplant weaker economic growth has been apparent with larger deficits leading to further weakness in economic growth. In fact, ever since Reagan first lowered taxes in the ’80’s both GDP growth and the deficit have only headed in one direction – higher.”
That was the deficit in September 2017.
Here it is today.
As opposed to all the promises made, economic growth failed to get stronger. Furthermore, federal revenues as a percentage of GDP declined to levels that have historically coincided with recessions.
Why Does This Matter?
President Trump just proposed his latest $4.8 Trillion budget, and not surprisingly, suggests the deficit will decrease over the next 10-years.
Such is a complete fantasy and was derived from mathematical gimmickry to delude voters to the contrary. As Jim Tankersley recently noted:
The White House makes the case that this is affordable and that the deficit will start to fall, dropping below $1 trillion in the 2021 fiscal year, and that the budget will be balanced by 2035. That projection relies on rosy assumptions about growth and the accumulation of new federal debt — both areas where the administration’s past predictions have proved to be overconfident.
The new budget forecasts a growth rate for the United States economy of 2.8 percent this year — or, by the metric the administration prefers to cite, a 3.1 percent rate. That is more than a half percentage point higher than forecasters at the Federal Reserve and the Congressional Budget Office predict.
It then predicts growth above 3 percent annually for the next several years if the administration’s economic policies are enacted. The Fed, the budget office and others all see growth falling below 2 percent annually in that time. By 2030, the administration predicts the economy will be more than 15 percent larger than forecasters at the budget office do.
Past administrations have also dressed up their budget forecasts with economic projections that proved far too good to be true. In its fiscal year 2011 budget, for example, the Obama administration predicted several years of growth topping 4 percent in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis — a number it never came close to reaching even once.
Trump’s budget expectations also contradict the Congressional Budget Office’s latest deficit warning:
“CBO estimates a 2020 deficit of $1.0 trillion, or 4.6 percent of GDP. The projected gap between spending and revenues increases to 5.4 percent of GDP in 2030. Federal debt held by the public is projected to rise over the coming decade, from 81 percent of GDP in 2020 to 98 percent of GDP in 2030. It continues to grow thereafter in CBO’s projections, reaching 180 percent of GDP in 2050, well above the highest level ever recorded in the United States.”
“With unprecedented trillion-dollar deficits projected as far as the eye can see, this country needs a serious budget. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of the one the President just submitted to Congress, which is filled with non-starters and make-believe economics.” – Maya Macguineas
Debt Slows Economic Growth
There is a long-standing addiction in Washington to debt. Every year, we continue to pile on more debt with the expectation that economic growth will soon follow.
However, excessive borrowing by companies, households or governments lies at the root of almost every economic crisis of the past four decades, from Mexico to Japan, and from East Asia to Russia, Venezuela, and Argentina. But it’s not just countries, but companies as well. You don’t have to look too far back to see companies like Enron, GM, Bear Stearns, Lehman, and a litany of others brought down by surging debt levels and simple “greed.” Households, too, have seen their fair share of debt burden related disaster from mortgages to credit cards to massive losses of personal wealth.
It would seem that after nearly 40-years, some lessons would have been learned.
Such reckless abandon by politicians is simply due to a lack of “experience” with the consequences of debt.
In 2008, Margaret Atwood discussed this point in a Wall Street Journal article:
“Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: Without story, there is no debt.
A story is a string of actions occurring over time — one damn thing after another, as we glibly say in creative writing classes — and debt happens as a result of actions occurring over time. Therefore, any debt involves a plot line: how you got into debt, what you did, said and thought while you were in there, and then — depending on whether the ending is to be happy or sad — how you got out of debt, or else how you got further and further into it until you became overwhelmed by it, and sank from view.”
The problem today is there is no “story” about the consequences of debt in the U.S. While there is a litany of other countries which have had their own “debt disaster” story, those issues have been dismissed under the excuse of “yes, but they aren’t the U.S.”
But this lack of a “story,” is what has led us to the very doorstep of “Modern Monetary Theory,” or “MMT.” As Michael Lebowitz previously explained:
“MMT theory essentially believes the government spending can be funded by printing money. Currently, government spending is funded by debt, and not the Fed’s printing press. MMT disciples tell us that when the shackles of debt and deficits are removed, government spending can promote economic growth, full employment and public handouts galore.
Free healthcare and higher education, jobs for everyone, living wages and all sorts of other promises are just a few of the benefits that MMT can provide. At least, that is how the theory is being sold.”
What’s not to love?
Oh yes, it’s that deficit thing.
Deficits Are Not Self-Financing
The premise of MMT is that government “deficit” spending is not a problem because the spending into “productive investments” pay for themselves over time.
But therein lies the problem – what exactly constitutes “productive investments?”
For government “deficit” spending to be effective, the “payback” from investments made must yield a higher rate of return than the interest rate on the debt used to fund it.
Examples of such investments range from the Hoover Dam to the Tennessee River Valley Authority. Importantly, “infrastructure spending projects,” must have a long-term revenue stream tied to time. Building roads and bridges to “nowhere,” may create short-term jobs, but once the construction is complete, the economic benefit turns negative.
The problem for MMT is its focus on spending is NOT productive investments but rather social welfare which has a negative rate of return.
Of course, the Government has been running a “Quasi-MMT” program since 1980.
According to the Center On Budget & Policy Priorities, roughly 75% of every current tax dollar goes to non-productive spending. (The same programs the Democrats are proposing.)
To make this clearer, in 2019, the Federal Government spent $4.8 Trillion, which was equivalent to 22% of the nation’s entire nominal GDP. Of that total spending, ONLY $3.6 Trillion was financed by Federal revenues, and $1.1 trillion was financed through debt.
In other words, if 75% of all expenditures go to social welfare and interest on the debt, those payments required $3.6 Trillion, or roughly 99% of the total revenue coming in.
There is also clear evidence that increasing debts and deficits DO NOT lead to either stronger economic growth or increasing productivity. As Michael Lebowitz previously showed:
“Since 1980, the long term average growth rate of productivity has stagnated in a range of 0 to 2% annually, a sharp decline from the 30 years following WWII when productivity growth averaged 4 to 6%. While there is no exact measure of productivity, total factor productivity (TFP) is considered one of the best measures. Data for TFP can found here.
The graph below plots a simple index we created based on total factor productivity (TFP) versus the ten-year average growth rate of TFP. The TFP index line is separated into green and red segments to highlight the change in the trend of productivity growth rate that occurred in the early 1970’s. The green dotted line extrapolates the trend of the pre-1972 era forward.”
“The plot of the 10-year average productivity growth (black line) against the ratio of total U.S. credit outstanding to GDP (green line) is telling.”
“This reinforces the message from the other debt-related graphs – over the last 30-years the economy has relied more upon debt growth and less on productivity to generate economic activity.
The larger the balance of debt has become, the more economically destructive it is by diverting an ever-growing amount of dollars away from productive investments to service payments.
Since 2008, the economy has been growing well below its long-term exponential trend. Such has been a consistent source of frustration for both Obama, Trump, and the Fed, who keep expecting higher rates of economic only to be disappointed.
The relevance of debt growth versus economic growth is all too evident. When debt issuance exploded under the Obama administration, and accelerated under President Trump, it has taken an ever-increasing amount of debt to generate $1 of economic growth.
Another way to view the impact of debt on the economy is to look at what “debt-free” economic growth would be. In other words, without debt, there has been no organic economic growth.
For the 30-years, from 1952 to 1982, the economic surplus fostered a rising economic growth rate, which averaged roughly 8% during that period. Today, with the economy expected to grow at just 2% over the long-term, the economic deficit has never been higher. If you subtract the debt, there has not been any organic economic growth since 1990.
What is indisputable is that running ongoing budget deficits that fund unproductive growth is not economically sustainable long-term.
The End Game Cometh
Over the last 40-years, the U.S. economy has engaged in increasing levels of deficit spending without the results promised by MMT.
There is also a cost to MMT we have yet to hear about from its proponents.
The value of the dollar, like any commodity, rises and falls as the supply of dollars change. If the government suddenly doubled the money supply, one dollar would still be worth one dollar but it would only buy half of what it would have bought prior to their action.
This is the flaw MMT supporters do not address.
MMT is not a free lunch.
MMT is paid for by reducing the value of the dollar and ergo your purchasing power. MMT is a hidden tax paid by everyone holding dollars. The problem, as Michael Lebowitz outlined in Two Percent for the One Percent, inflation tends to harm the poor and middle class while benefiting the wealthy.
This is why the wealth gap is more pervasive than ever. Currently, the Top 10% of income earners own nearly 87% of the stock market. The rest are just struggling to make ends meet.
As I stated above, the U.S. has been running MMT for the last three decades, and has resulted in social inequality, disappointment, frustration, and a rise in calls for increasing levels of socialism.
It is all just as you would expect from such a theory put into practice, and history is replete with countries that have attempted the same. Currently, the limits of profligate spending in Washington has not been reached, and the end of this particular debt story is yet to be written.
But, it eventually will be.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 18:25 - While Sanders Lead Pack In Primary Polls, Oddsmaker Has Bloomberg Beating Trump In General Election
While Sanders Lead Pack In Primary Polls, Oddsmaker Has Bloomberg Beating Trump In General Election
While Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is now favored to be the likely Democratic nominee following Joe Biden’s implosion, Democratic voters are going to need to think long and hard about whether a socialist whose policies would wreak economic havoc can possibly rally enough left-wing voters – including moderate Democrats – to come out to the polls in November in large enough numbers to beat Trump.
To put it lightly, things are dismal according to pollsters, who, if you recall from the last election, suck. Left-wing darling Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has ‘no one’ as most likely to win the enough delegates to automatically win the Democratic primary nomination – which would lead to a brokered convention.
Meanwhile, a Thursday Deutsche Bank survey reveals that while Bernie Sanders will probably be the nominee, Michael Bloomberg has the greatest chance of winning vs. President Trump.
The key takeaway this month is how different market expectations are from polling data on the upcoming US Presidential election. This could have major market ramifications going forward. The key issue is that an overwhelming number thought that President Trump would be re-elected in the November election, with 95% viewing it as either “slightly” or “extremely” likely. This level has just been increasing since the question was first posed in November, but there was a massive jump in “extremely” likely voters this month (63% from 43%). This may be on the back of improving approval ratings and high uncertainty about the Democratic nominee. To give some context, polling companies suggest Trump is close to a coin toss of being re-elected. So a huge mismatch. -Deutsche Bank
To that end, one online sports book has Bloomberg winning the electoral college vs. Trump – a result shared by Quinnipac in a Monday poll.
Online sports book @betonline_ag says Trump has “his best odds yet to win the 2020 election since he was elected” — but adds, “For electoral college matchups, Bloomberg is actually favored over Trump.”https://t.co/4IKSA9Qxu6 pic.twitter.com/4cZYtjXF4p
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) February 14, 2020
Oddsmaker PredictIt, meanwhile, has Trump winning decisively as Sanders has risen as the likely contender, leaving one to wonder what the below chart would look like if Bloomberg were the likely nominee?
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.jsSo while most polls still have Sanders as the frontrunner, and a brokered Democratic convention may be in the cards – it’s clear that Michael Bloomberg is fast emerging as the left’s best chance of defeating President Trump.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/14/2020 – 18:05
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